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by bandrami 46 days ago
> You're gonna be googling the CLI switches for at least 10 minutes

So there's this really amazing program called "man"

3 comments

Yea there's something called a phone book too.
And that would be a much better source for a phone number than Googling. Similarly, the docs that ship with software are a better source for command line switches for that software than a search engine or LLM.
My lived experience right now is a lot of super talented people around me using these tools all day every day to build awesome things and then there's the randos like you on HN who think they know better. Protip: You don't know squat.
The docs that ship with it are a great source for the LLM who will be running the command and monitoring its output, fixing or adjusting whatever in order to complete my goal. Why on earth would I be calling it by hand?
> Why on earth would I be calling it by hand?

So that it's done correctly instead of wrongly

pictured

> man plows field by hand

Which is generally slower than Googling, because it's paged content in a terminal which can search only for literal strings?
This was true a decade ago; unfortunately Google has become more or less useless for most purposes at this point
You are right, but I think you miss the whole point of the agentic workflows that are being discussed in this post comments.

Yes, you surely can read man, docs, whatever, then DIY. The point is that in many areas people don’t really want to become an expert, like in ffmpeg cli arguments, they just want the work to be done. Above is an example of agent being able to do it locally, and I think it’s great

This is the part of LLMs I may just be too old to "get" because I can't imagine what people are doing that looking up command line switches is some kind of time suck they worry enough about to find a way to automate